Public charging infrastructure is rapidly ramping up around the country, but it’s woefully lacking in one area: ease of use. Anyone who’s tried to charge an electric vehicle—except for those from Tesla—probably knows that it can be a jungle out there, with inconsistent charger interfaces, …

Google headquarters in Mountain View. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)<p>Last March I wrote about an early experiment using Google’s Cloud Vision API to perform deep learning-powered geocoding of 20 million global news images. In that experiment I compiled 20 million photographs that had appeared in …

<b>Maps of our cities have been around since the 15th century, but today’s merge technology and art like never before</b><p>As you might have guessed from some of my previous posts, I’m a huge fan of data visualization, especially when it relates to cities. One of my favorite books is The Information …

One specialized unit gathered data that could guide a missile to a target thousands of miles away.<p>When Gordon Barnes joined the U.S. Air Force in 1956, he worked as a navigator on the tanker planes that refuel long-range bombers in midair. Coordinating a connection between two planes moving …

Snapchat’s newest feature, Snap Map, is based on its latest acquisition, social mapping startup Zenly. TechCrunch has learned that Snapchat has bought Zenly for between $250 million and $350 million in mostly cash and some stock in a deal that closed in late May. Snapchat will keep Zenly running …

Over the past few months, CSAIL’s (MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) self-driving wheelchair has become a familiar sight around the MIT halls. It’s a nice little rolling advertisement for the lab’s work — and more importantly, it’s a great opportunity to test the mobility …

In the era of satellites and Google Maps there are still areas that remain a mystery<p>On a quiet summer evening, the Aurora, a 60ft cutter-rigged sloop, approaches the craggy shore of eastern Greenland, along what is known as the Forbidden Coast. Its captain, Sigurdur Jonsson, a sturdy man in his …

An amateur cartographer at Washington State University took on the huge task of gathering precinct voting data.<p>If you’ve been following CityLab since November 8, you’ve seen a lot of U.S. presidential election maps. But this new one is a little different. It came to our attention via Twitter …

You may not be aware, but Uber offers an open source version of the data visualization framework it uses internally, called deck.gl. The tool was made available to anyone via open source license last November, and now it’s getting some key updates that should help make it more useful to external …

From Brooklyn to San Francisco, Michelle Chandra turns famous cities into tricky but beautiful mazes.<p>In the age of Google Maps and built-in GPS, the value of getting lost has been mostly forgotten. But sometimes, getting lost in a city means seeing the place in a new way, discovering a new …

From #lataqueriasf to #olivegarden<p>A creative new map renames Bay Area transit stop for what’s really important: the most popular Instagram hashtags in their general vicinity. Designed by Jug Cerovic, David Goldwich, and Tin Fischer, the map—billed Tags and the City—uses geotagged Instagram data to …